President Obama has begun telling the right story about the economy. Now we need to make sure that story spreads.

Two years ago, frustrated by a conservative resurgence in the 2010 election, a group of progressive activists, economists, communicators, and pollsters came together to write a compelling story about our view of the economy ( as Mike Lux relates). Our goal was to write a story that people could easily understand, based on our beliefs about how to create an economy that delivered broadly shared prosperity — a story that could stand up against the right’s familiar recipe of free markets, limited government, and rugged individualism. The core of the story we developed in our progressive economic narrative (PEN) was: “The middle class is the engine of our economy. We build a large, prosperous middle class by decisions we make together.”

So it was a milestone in our work to hear President Obama tell our story and use our language in his State of the Union address. The key line, delivered at the top of the speech and quoted in almost every news story, was “It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth: a rising, thriving middle class.”

Taking another lesson from PEN, the president prefaced that quote with an explanation of what the economic problem is, focusing on how working families and the middle class have been crushed. In PEN we say, “American families are working harder and getting paid less, falling behind our parents’ generation. Too many Americans can’t find good jobs and too many jobs don’t pay enough to support a family. Big corporations have cut our wages and benefits and shipped our jobs overseas.” Here’s the president’s version:

But – we gather here knowing that there are millions of Americans whose hard work and dedication have not been rewarded. Our economy is adding jobs, but too many people still can’t find full-time employment. Corporate profits have skyrocketed to all-time highs, but for more than a decade, wages and incomes have barely budged. It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of Americas economic growth: a rising, thriving middle class.

When it came to describing how we build this middle-class engine, the president again used the same ideas frame laid out in PEN: “We build a large and prosperous middle class through the decisions we make together; investing in our people, expanding opportunity and security, paving the way for business to innovate, and to do business in ways that create prosperity and economic security for Americans.” The president’s agenda was based on these same concepts:

Invest in people through education (starting at Pre-K), skills we need for today’s jobs, affordable health care, and a secure retirement.

Pave the way for businesses through research, infrastructure, and green energy.

Do business in ways that create prosperity, with a higher minimum wage and pay equity for women.

The president’s story contrasted sharply with Marco Rubio’s. Rubio also paid homage to the middle class, but he told the conservative tale:

This opportunity – to make it to the middle class or beyond no matter where you start out in life – it isn’t bestowed on us from Washington. It comes from a vibrant free economy where people can risk their own money to open a business. And when they succeed, they hire more people, who in turn invest or spend the money they make, helping others start a business and create jobs. Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity.

So the fight is joined. For too long, progressives have not taken on the conservative story with our own narrative. As a result, even when people agree with us on specific issues, they still hold fast to the right’s definition of how to move the economy forward. We have, with the simple tale told by the president and in the progressive economic narrative, a very different story, an economy driven by working families and the middle class, which we create by decisions we make together, with our government as the catalyst.

Our next task is to tell this same story over and over again in all of our communications. Repetition is key. People need to hear the story whenever we communicate on an economic issue. We give examples of how do to that on job quality, job creation, the federal fiscal mess, and health care at progressivenarrative.org.

President Obama left out one part of the progressive economic narrative in his speech. As we say in PEN, “Our political system has been captured by the rich and powerful and corrupted by big money in politics. The issue is not the size of the government, it’s who the government works for – powerful corporations and the richest few, or all of us. We have to take our democracy back to ensure that our economy will work for all of us. ”

That’s a story that politicians are reluctant to tell. As always, we need to lead and the leaders will follow. It is up to us to build an America and economy that works for all us. Clearly describing our vision of how to do that is a crucial element of building power that progressives overlooked for too long. We’re much closer when the president tells that story to the nation. It’s up to us to keep telling it every day.

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a Senior Adviser to USAction, and the author of Fighting for Our Health. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform.

No surprise that a populist progressive Democrat like me would like President Obama’s State Of The Union address that talked so much about lifting up the middle class. But there’s a background story on getting to the President’s message last night that is little known but worth telling.

January of 2011 was a very bleak moment for progressive leaders. The tea party Republicans had just taken over the US House as well as way too many state legislative chambers and Governor’s seats, but that wasn’t the only reason we were depressed. President Obama, clearly shaken by the massive losses of 2010, was in retreat both in his messaging and in his political strategy. He had decided to spend almost as much of his rhetorical firepower as the Republicans on the deficit issue, and was eagerly looking to compromise with them- “meet them more than halfway”, as he was fond of saying. Obama had just given in on a two year extension of the Bush tax cuts for the top 2%, and it was clear he was willing to give up a lot more. By the summer of 2011, Obama’s political low point, he had given up an enormous amount in spending cuts for progressive priorities on both a budget cutting compromise in the spring and the debt ceiling deal in the summer, and gotten no concessions at all from the Republicans on tax increases for the wealthy.

Three things happened, though, that turned the political tide and brought us to our present political moment: a handily re-elected and confident President with his highest approval ratings ever and a strong populist progressive message.

First, this President and his political team showed themselves quite good at learning from their mistakes, as they switched strategies and message. Second, the Republicans seriously over-reached, following their far right base over the political cliff on issues, and nominating the ultimate symbol of Wall Street arrogance as their party’s standard bearer. And third, progressives showed that they could create a way to influence the debate and pull the President toward a stronger, clearer message.

The first of these two things are well known and well documented. The third is not, but it is a story progressives should hear and understand as they move forward to work on influencing the debate over the next few years. It all starts in that bleak month of January, 2011. Faced with tea party Republicans on a roll and a defensive back-tracking President, progressive leaders from the labor movement, other progressive organizations, and the Netroots movement met together to talk about how we could create a progressive populist center of gravity powerful enough to pull the President in our direction. What we believed is that we had not been effective over the previous couple of years in telling our story of how the economy works and why Americans should choose progressive policies that focused on helping low and middle income families. We invited to the discussions smart message folks like Stan Greenberg, Celinda Lake, Paul Begala, Drew Weston, and Van Jones to help us craft a narrative that would have a strong appeal to the vast majority of American voters.

This is what we came up with, a progressive economic narrative that we could all rally around. And the progressive movement came together to tell that story. Labor union presidents started telling that story in their speeches, and union organizers began telling that story in their organizing work. Online organizations like Rebuild the Dream and Moveon started using some of this language in their emails. Bloggers started writing about it in their blog posts. Broad progressive coalitions on the budget fights started getting briefed on how to use it in their budget messaging. Networks of state and local progressive organizations like USAction and the Center for Community Change started using it in their local organizing work. Progressive think tanks like Campaign for America’s Future and Center for American Progress told the story in some of their messaging work. Progressive academics like Jacob Hacker used some of the language in his landmark economic plan Prosperity Economics: Building an Economy for All.

It took a while, and of course (as it should be) every group and leader using the narrative had their own angle on the story. We weren’t all marching lockstep, and that was the way it should be. But these same basic ideas were a part of our collective story telling: that a rising, prosperous middle class as the engine of our economy; how we need to expand that middle class by bringing the poor and the young into it, not shrink it by having a low wage economy; that we needed not only jobs but good jobs with rising wages; that all Americans deserved the opportunity to reach our full potential; that government needs to be on the side of all Americans, not only the wealthy and powerful; that we needed to promote American manufacturing, and invest in our infrastructure and our schools.

And now they are at the heart of the story President Obama has been telling the American people in his SOTU, in his 2nd inaugural address, on the campaign trail last year. From last night: “It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth- a rising, thriving middle class.” And “A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs- that must be the North Star that guides our efforts.” And “no one who works full time should have to live in poverty…” And “Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger America. It is this kind of prosperity- broad, shared, and built on a thriving middle class- that has always been the source of our progress at home.” You are speaking our language, Mr. President.

It wasn’t because the President’s speech writers saw the website and thought it sounded good. It was because they are reading the same polling we are, because they are seeing the same focus groups. It is because this is where the American people have come around to after flirting with the tea party no government is ever good rhetoric. America’s middle class knows it is getting crushed, and it knows that wealthy and powerful special interests have been making out like bandits on the backs of the rest of us. People are rallying around the story we are telling because it is common sense. The progressive center of gravity we built with this narrative pulled the president and the public in our direction because the story is true, and because it has powerful resonance in people’s lives.

What Democrats and progressives need to do is what President Obama has been doing ever since he made his turn to this message in his speech in the fall of 2011 in Osawatomie, Kansas: keep telling the story over and over again. And here’s what else we, and the President, need to do: follow up by pushing big, politically bold ideas for rebuilding that middle class and holding the big special interests accountable. Government policies can and should promote higher wages through the minimum wage increase, stronger unions, and government contractors being forced to pay their workers better; government investments in manufacturing, green energy, infrastructure, and education need to be made; corporate crooks including those on Wall Street need to be prosecuted for their crimes, and companies that are so big that they are able to manipulate markets need to be broken up.

This is what progressives should be fighting for, and this is the story we should be telling. It is our moment, and the American people are listening.

]]>http://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2013/02/13/a-progressive-economic-narrative/feed/0Showdown in Washington – Resourceshttp://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2012/11/08/showdown/
http://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2012/11/08/showdown/#commentsThu, 08 Nov 2012 20:46:46 +0000Adminhttp://educationfund.usaction.org/?p=627The 2012 elections are over, and the mandate was clear: “We’re all in this together”defeated “You’re on your own.” Now, in the looming fiscal showdown, we must make certain Congress gets the message.

Congress needs to act by early next year to avoid a automatic cuts that would trigger a double-dip recession and millions more out of work This will be a showdown between two visions: prosperity for working families and the middle-class or more for millionaires and CEOs With so much at stake, we need to send a unified message to our members of congress to pick prosperity for all. Here are resources to learn more about what’s at stake and to take action.

Understanding what’s at Stake:

Powerpoint This powerpoint reviews what’s at stake in the Budget showdown with clear slides and narrative. It reviews the four principles progressives have joined together to fight for and action steps you can take get involved and make a difference.

Webinar Recording This video is a full recording of the webinar by USAction and the Coalition on Human Needs. The webinar uses the PPT and script from above and details action steps for progressives organizers and activists.

Build State and Local Coalitions:

Showdown Agenda. Help organize a conversation in your town or state about the budget
showdown. This sample agenda shows how you can organize a meeting to build agreement on our agenda and help others take action.

Increase taxes for middle class families by cutting child, college tuition and earned income tax credits.

Voted to raise taxes on 25 million working Americans by an average of $1,000 by cutting child, college tuition and earned income tax credits. The House-passed extension of the Bush-era tax cuts would raise taxes on 25 million working families to help pay for the tax breaks that only go to the richest 2 percent. It does this by ending a tax credit that helps make college affordable (the American Opportunity Tax Credit) and ending improvements to the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, which benefit working families.

Increase average medical costs for [X#] Seniors in the district by $5,000 over the next 10 years, by ending programs to close the donut hole and for free preventative care.

Source:

Voted for Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget, which repeals the ACA, including several provisions in Medicare that reduce out-of-pocket costs to Seniors and people with disabilities. These include programs to reduce the prescription drug costs to Seniors falling into the ‘donut hole’ and providing many preventive services to people with Medicare at no additional cost. Slowing the rate of increase of costs to Medicare due to other provisions in the ACA was also a factor in the study.

The latest Census data prove that we need to start rebuilding the American middle class, and a new report shows how it can be done.

Yesterday the U.S. Census Bureau reported that family income in the U.S. dropped to its lowest level in 16 years. The key thing in this news is that the drop is not just over the last three years, during the Great Recession. The squeeze on the middle class isn’t new, it wasn’t caused by the recession, and it won’t be fixed as we come out of the recession. If we’re going to rebuild the middle class, we need an agenda aimed at making work pay in the 21st century.

Before we get to what we do about it, we need to confront the fact that even though the proportion of Americans with a college education doubled in the past three decades, the share of working people with a decent job dropped. Six out of ten (58 percent) jobs now emerging from the recession are low-wage. On top of that, the jobs projected to have the most openings between now and 2020 are mostly low-wage and require no more than a high school education. So there is no reason to think things will get better unless we act.

One set of solutions proposed in 10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class is totackle the lack of support and protections for low-wage workers. A first step is to restore the minimum wage, which buys 30 percent less now than it did 40 years ago. The minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour, the same as it was in 1991. One in five workers would get a pay raise if the minimum wage were increased. That includes workers who get paid just above today’s minimum wage, who would also benefit as the legal floor got raised.

Remarkably, four out of ten private sector jobs – including the great majority of low-wage jobs – do not give employees any paid time off if they are sick or need to care for an ill family member. In response, Connecticut and several cities have passed paid sick days ordinances. The federal government and states and localities should update basic labor standards to include this essential benefit to working families.

The report recommends tough enforcement, with meaningful penalties, of laws that unscrupulous employers now routinely flout. Many employers of low-wage workers routinely steal wages by not paying the minimum wage, not paying for overtime, or simply not paying workers at all. Other employers misclassify workers as “independent contractors” in order to get out of paying payroll taxes or benefits and hire “permatemps.” Worker safety and health is another area where measly penalties, weak enforcement, and widespread retaliation against workers who dare to speak up allow employers to keep low-wage workers in hazardous work conditions every day.

It will take systemic solutions to address the broader problem of stagnant wages. A crucial step is to uphold the freedom of workers to organize a union by modernizing the National Labor Relations Act and stopping employers from harassing organizing efforts with virtual impunity. Nothing in our nation’s history has done more to bring workers decent pay, benefits, and dignity at work than organized labor. The factory workers of the mid-20th Century didn’t have a college education; they organized unions. The low-wage workers of the 21st Century – the housekeepers and janitors and home health aids and retail clerks – will only be able to get decent wages and become part of the middle class when they are able to effectively organize to bargain collectively.

Other proposals in the 10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class report would create new social insurance protections for the 21st Century, just as Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid were key to fighting poverty and building the middle class in the last century. The nation took one major step in 2010 with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which in 2014 will enable working families to get affordable health coverage even if they don’t get it on the job.

The report proposes two other steps to provide families more security in their work and in their retirement. Though today’s norm is for all the adults in a family to be in the workforce, only one in ten workers (12 percent) has paid family leave through work to care for a new child or a sick family member. A solution is to establish a national family and medical leave insurance program, similar to Social Security and successful programs in California and New Jersey, for workers to draw on when they are out on family leave.

To address the fact that pensions have been replaced by thread-bare 401Ks over the past 30 years, the report recommends establishing new pooled and professionally managed retirement plans for those who rely solely on Social Security and 401Ks, which would pay a defined amount – a pension – each month.

In addition to these and other steps, 10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class recognizes that a foundation of improving work is full employment. That is why we need to stop laying off public workers and outsourcing jobs overseas. It’s also why we should create millions of jobs now by investing in infrastructure and a green economy.

Rebuilding the middle class is about more than assuring that every working American can support his or her family with dignity and security. It’s about powering the economy forward in the 21st Century. The middle class is the engine of our economy, an engine that can only be rebuilt by making today’s jobs good and tomorrow’s jobs better.

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a Board member and Senior Adviser to USAction, and the author ofFighting for Our Health. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now! during the legislative battle to pass reform.

]]>http://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2012/09/13/how-to-make-work-pay-again/feed/010 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Classhttp://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2012/09/13/10waystorebuildmiddleclass/
http://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2012/09/13/10waystorebuildmiddleclass/#commentsThu, 13 Sep 2012 14:21:10 +0000Adminhttp://educationfund.usaction.org/2012/09/13/10waystorebuildmiddleclass/The middle class is the great engine of our economy, but today that engine is sputtering and as a result, both American families and the economy are struggling. Too many workers have jobs that don’t pay enough to support a family, and too many can’t find work at all. Meanwhile, the jobs that will grow the most in the next decade are expected to be low-wage and stripped of benefits. We’re on an unsustainable course and it’s time for U-turn.

Offering a way forward, more than a dozen leading national organizations that research the economy, advocate for good jobs and represent workers have come together topropose 10 steps to build the middle class. The guiding principles of the roadmap are values we all share: that work lies at the center of a robust and sustainable economy; that all work has dignity; and that through work, all of us should be able to support our families, educate our children and enjoy our retirements.

Unless our nation focuses on making today’s jobs better and tomorrow’s jobs good, the long-term prospects for our families’ well-being and the national economy are bleak. But they don’t have to be if we stand up and fight for a prosperity economy that’s outlined in this report.

Some might think the jobs being created in today’s economy are being shaped by some kind of invisible hand – that there is little we can do to change that. But a strong middle class doesn’t happen by accident.

Rebuilding the great American middle class in the 21st century will once again require deliberate action by the American people, through our government and by businesses that understand that our mutual long-term prosperity depends on treating workers everywhere with dignity and giving them the means to a decent standard of living. It will mean taking a U-turn from the policies of the past 30 years, which have squeezed workers in the pursuit of short-term profits, slowly hollowing out the middle class on which our long-term prosperity is built.

Together, we can set a course that will honor work, help rebuild the middle class and drive us forward to a more powerful, sustainable economy.

Read the full report here and share the above image here. We need good jobs for America now.

]]>http://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2012/09/13/10waystorebuildmiddleclass/feed/0Organizing Jobless Americans for an Economy that Works for ALL of Ushttp://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2012/07/11/organizing-jobless-americans-for-an-economy-that-works-for-all-of-us/
http://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2012/07/11/organizing-jobless-americans-for-an-economy-that-works-for-all-of-us/#commentsWed, 11 Jul 2012 17:38:12 +0000Adminhttp://educationfund.usaction.org/?p=327USAEF Partner Ocean State Action Fund was in the news recently for their Where’s the Work? campaign. You can take action with OSAF here: bit.ly/whereisthework

Making unemployment statistics personal

AUDIO at the link above.

PROVIDENCE, RI (RIPR) - Some unemployed Rhode Islanders who are tired of being treated like statistics have banded together into a group called the “Where’s the Work Initiative?” Their goal is to put faces on the more than 61-thousand Rhode Islanders who want but can’t find work.

Barbara Baldwin was laid off from her job with a non-profit in April. The one-time director of the state chapter of Planned Parenthood, she says she’s sent out dozens of resumes but hasn’t so much as landed her first interview. “I’m applying for administrative assistant positions, for part time positions for full time positions, and it’s really hard even to make it to the level of getting an interview.”

Baldwin is a charter member of “Where’s the Work”, an Ocean State Action Fund program whose aim is to let the news media and policy makers know that there are real people behind the unemployment statistics.

Aaron Regunburg runs the program. “Most people know that unemployment’s a big problem but in all the public dialogue that’s taking place around this issue there always seems to one thing left out: the voices of Rhode Islanders who are going through the crisis.”

One of the group’s missions is to monitor and report on layoffs at the state Department of Labor and Training which take effect later this month.

]]>http://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2012/07/11/organizing-jobless-americans-for-an-economy-that-works-for-all-of-us/feed/0Progressive Narrativehttp://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2012/05/24/progressive-narrative/
http://www.usactioneducationfund.org/2012/05/24/progressive-narrative/#commentsThu, 24 May 2012 15:07:52 +0000Adminhttp://educationfund.usaction.org/?p=300USAEF’s Richard Kirsch has been working with a group of progressive leaders and communicators to craft a progressive economic narrative, a simple effective way to telling our story about the roles of the individual, business, and government in creating shared prosperity.

Check out some of the materials and presentations below that have trained hundreds of organizers and progressive activists across the country the past 6 months.